Bierce begins by borrowing a line he assumes a schoolboy will recognise. "Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell" echoes Thomas Campbell's poem *The Pleasures of Hope*, which mourns the Polish patriot Kosciusko. In Campbell the shriek is a single, solemn moment of grief. Bierce makes it permanent. "On every wind, indeed, that blows / I hear her yell." That slightly pompous "indeed" is the first sign of a joke. Freedom has not shrieked once and fallen silent. She is screaming all the time, because someone is always betraying her.
The form carries much of the humour. Each stanza runs three lines of steady, marching rhythm, then a short fourth line that lands like a slap: "I hear her yell," "And toll her knell," "Her clamors swell," "And give her Hell." Bierce also rhymes the second and fourth lines on "-ell" in every stanza, so that fell, yell, well, knell, spell, swell, compel and Hell chime through the whole poem. The repetition sounds like a bell being struck, which suits a poem about a funeral. It also makes the reader feel there is no way out of the sound, just as there is no escape from the screaming. The other rhymes are tidy too (knows/blows, meet/feet, cast/blast) until the last stanza, where "given" and "Heaven" only half match. Perhaps the neatness slips just where heaven is being carved up.
The targets widen as the poem goes on. In the second stanza it is "monarchs" and "parliaments as well." That casual "as well" lumps kings and elected assemblies together, as if the difference barely matters. Their meetings are described through two grim images: chains "about her feet" and a bell tolling her "knell." Freedom is both prisoner and corpse. Then the third stanza turns on the voters, "the sovereign people" who "cast / The votes they cannot spell." The phrase "sovereign people" sounds grand, and the spelling joke deflates it at once. The wind from the first stanza has also gone bad, now a "pestilential blast," so even the air carries disease. The poem does not rescue Freedom by pointing at a villain and a hero. Kings are guilty, legislators are guilty, and the crowd is made to look foolish.
The last stanza is the trap that closes on all of them. Anyone "to whom the power's given / To sway or to compel" is included. Those two verbs name the two tools of power, persuasion and force, and the poem suggests it hardly matters which is used. The final pun does the real damage. The powerful "apportion Heaven" among themselves, dividing it like spoils or property, "and give her Hell." Hell is both what Freedom is left with and what she gets as punishment. The word lands as a curse, a sentence and a joke at once.
Look too at how Freedom is described. She is "her," a woman who shrieks, yells, screams and "clamors," and the poem gives her almost nothing else to do. She never acts and no one answers her. That makes the tone more complicated than plain mockery. The speaker hears her everywhere, which suggests someone is paying attention, even if only to say how hopeless it is.
Bierce is known as an American writer of bitter satire, and *The Devil's Dictionary* is the best known example. This poem works like one of its definitions: short, polished, and ending on a sting. What makes it worth reading is how little it flatters. Patriotic poems often name a tyrant and a martyr, and Bierce borrows the most quoted martyr line he can find, then refuses the comfort that comes with it. Freedom is a word every side claims and no side serves. The poem does not say freedom is worthless. If it were, the screaming would not bother the speaker so much. What it distrusts is everyone who talks about freedom while holding power over others, including, uncomfortably, the voters who think they are the ones who rule.